The Experiment

Here's the experiment. The final project for SPAN 453 is a glosario of Lorca's "Juego y teoría del duende." I divided the class into 5 groups with 5 themes. Each groups has 3 or 4 students in it. Each student is responsible for 5 entries in the glossary, so there will be 85 entries:

The five groups are

Geography and Culture
Literature and Philosophy
Duende in the English Speaking World
Visual Arts
Music & Dance

Each group will give a group presentation. There will also be one entry by each student that deals with a topic in depth, in a paragraph rather than in a brief entry.

The goals are:

A pedagogical tool that other classes can use, both to understand Lorca's essay and to see what they themselves might be capable of.

Practice writing in Spanish. All the entries have to be grammatically correct.

Narrowing the gap between the research that students are able to do and the kind of research a professor might do, rather than isolating students from faculty research.

An article for Hispania that I will write on the results of all of this?

A critical edition of the duende that I could do at some point. The closest this comes to what real scholars do is the preparation of the Clásicos Castalia, those black paperbacks that exist for every canonical work of Spanish literature. I showed my students one of those and what it was like.